03-31-2009, 12:00 AM

Hey everyone,

This is for anyone interested in the development process behind Chromium and eventually Google Chrome for OS X.

After reading an article on Ars Technica about the evolution of Chromium for OS X, I decided to do what they did and build it from source. This is something you do while you are away from the computer - not that it took a really long time (it did take a while though) but it takes a toll on system resources.

I did two builds, Debug and Release. The Debug release was ~ 86MB which is considerably larger than the size of Firefox 3.0.8 (50MB), Safari 4 beta (13.3MB) and Opera 9.64 (15.3MB). It was really buggy - I had to hold down the power button to turn off the computer after it locked up OS X and prevented me from doing anything. The Release build is much better - it's only 26MB and will actually quit and respond to my requests.

As for the experience itself, it renders pages well and quite fast. Many of the functions of the browser are still under heavy development so you may notice things missing if you give it a try. At this point, Acid3 scores 100/100 but fails the linktest. No history is recorded and you can't open a local file but you can bookmark sites. It appears to use Cocoa widgets on the pages which is nice from an integration standpoint.

That's about it for now. I'll let you guys know if there is anything else noteworthy after some more tests as my testing is fairly limited at this point. If I can figure out the licensing scheme (it says BSD plus some other licenses) and whether I'm allowed to distribute it, I'll put it up for you guys to test for yourself in case you don't want to waste to time, don't have Xcode installed or both.

Obligatory screenshot:
Picture 2.png

EDIT: If you want to tackle this yourself, have lot's of space available. After doing the Debug and Release builds, the source folder was 8GB. Yes, 8GB. Also, to add to what I said earlier, you can't maximize the window as the maximize button is greyed out.

03-31-2009, 12:05 AM

Thanks so much for the heads up. I was wondering what was up with it for OSX. I might just try to build it. Just for the fun of it. I will skip the develop one!

03-31-2009, 09:03 AM

Originally Posted by dtravis7

I might just try to build it. Just for the fun of it.

The nerdiness is strong in you .

It's a pretty straightforward and painless build. Download a tarball/sync with svn repo, open the xcodeproj and Build. While that is simplifying it a bit, it's not that far from the truth. Here are the OS X build instructions. One thing to note - make sure the tree is open if you decide to go the sync route. If not, you're going to have problems.

The OS X build is coming along. It still needs quite a bit of work though. The Ars article in fact alludes to the notion that a beta may be as last as the fall (worst case hopefully). The article actually states:

Although Google will not specify a target date, they assured us that they would be "very surprised" and "very unhappy" if fall came and went without a public beta.

03-31-2009, 03:09 PM

I just ran the SunSpider JS benchmark and got some promising results. Here is a comparison with other browsers:

Opera 9.64: 6434.8ms +/- 1.1%
Opera 10 (build 6284): 5569.0ms +/- 1.0%
Firefox 3.0.7: 3426.0ms +/- 0.7%
Firefox 3.1 (beta 3): 1724.0ms +/- 1.7%
Safari 4 beta: 867.6ms +/- 2.7%
Chromium (Mar 30 build): 783.6ms +/- 1.2%

I don't have Safari 3 installed nor wanted to reinstall it for the sake of comparison.

The conditions I did this test under were a different but I'm not sure how much this would affect the benchmark (running different external programs, different net connections, Chromium test was on battery power as opposed to the others where I was running on AC power).

Take these as you will.

04-01-2009, 11:51 PM

Well, in case anyone does have some interest in Chromium, I have figured out the licensing (a simple look in the source folder was all I had to do - I should have known that the first time). It's released under the BSD license and as such, I have uploaded my build from Mar 30 if you would like to take it for a run. Be aware though that there are quite a few rough edges and I recommend you use this only to test it and not for any serious browsing.

You can get it here.

04-02-2009, 12:34 AM

Interesting. Safari 4 on the iMac G5 iSight 2.1Ghz is way slow. 7000+ or around . I have Safari 3 on my Intel 2.16 Ghz Mini and it did 2200. Crome on the same mini did 748.6 +-2.3. I would try Chrome on the G5 but alas it will not run on PPC hardware. Going to try Safari 4 on the Mini. Will post back.

Ok update: Mac Mini 2.16Ghz C2D 2GB RAM

Opera 9.6.4 = 6294.2ms +/- 0.8%
Firefox 3.0.8 = 3300.6ms +/- 1.7%
Safari 4 Developer Preview was 2210 but forget the % but its way slower than 4 Beta and chrome for sure.
Safari 4 Beta = 827.6ms +/- 1.7%
Google Chrome = 748.6 +-2.3%

04-02-2009, 12:18 PM

It seems that SquirrelFish (is this included in Safari 4?) and V8 process JS pretty quickly. Firefox is coming along nicely but I have to give credit to Google for writing V8 so fast and apparently, fairly well.

I'm going to do a another build in a couple of days again and test that. I realize a few days is not much but the source tree is updated constantly.